Near-unity NIR phosphorescent quantum yield from a room-temperature solvated metal nanocluster

Wan-Qi Shi; Linlin Zeng; Rui-Lin He; Xu-Shuang Han; Zong-Jie Guan; Meng Zhou; Quan-Ming Wang

doi:10.1126/science.adk6628

Near-unity NIR phosphorescent quantum yield from a room-temperature solvated metal nanocluster

Science. 2024 Jan 19;383(6680):326-330. doi: 10.1126/science.adk6628. Epub 2024 Jan 18.

Authors

Wan-Qi Shi^#¹, Linlin Zeng^#², Rui-Lin He¹, Xu-Shuang Han¹, Zong-Jie Guan^{1

3}, Meng Zhou², Quan-Ming Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Engineering Research Center of Advanced Rare Earth Materials (Ministry of Education), Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P. R. China.
² Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Department of Chemical Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P. R. China.
³ Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, P. R. China.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 38236955
DOI: 10.1126/science.adk6628

Abstract

Metal nanoclusters have emerged as promising near-infrared (NIR)-emissive materials, but their room-temperature photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY), especially in solution, is often low (<10%). We studied the photophysics of Au₂₂(^tBuPhC≡C)₁₈ (Au₂₂) and its alloy counterpart Au₁₆Cu₆(^tBuPhC≡C)₁₈ (Au₁₆Cu₆) (where ^tBu is tert-butyl and Ph is phenyl) and found that copper (Cu) doping suppressed the nonradiative decay (~60-fold less) and promoted intersystem crossing rate (~300-fold higher). The Au₁₆Cu₆ nanocluster exhibited >99% PLQY in deaerated solution at room temperature with an emission maximum at 720 nanometers tailing to 950 nanometers and 61% PLQY in the oxygen-saturated solution. The approach to achieve near-unity PLQY could enable the development of highly emissive metal cluster materials.